SAN DIEGO _ Everything about Jake Palet was big. He played high school football at 6-3 and more than 300 pounds. There was the smile that filled rooms, melting away any hesitation about the intimidating frame. There was the huge heart, opened wide to kids who played baseball for him. There were those enormous arms, used to coil around those most important in his life.
The demons? Big, too.
When depression put its hooks into Palet as a ninth-grader, it refused to let go for more than three years _ despite a blur of medications, psychiatrists and psychologists. That's the thing about depression, it torments in the shadows when you're at your most vulnerable; brave faces and confident fronts and small victories be damned. It's needling, relentless and unforgiving.
As Palet neared his 20th birthday, his father Dave _ a longtime sports radio personality in San Diego _ and older brother, Josh, a former walk-on quarterback at Alabama, exhaled as they saw the darkness loosening its grip. Jake had joined them to coach Bonita Vista High School, helping select the team and run drills at the first two practices. Excitement bubbled about a new path, as a stand-up comedian.
The changes offered purpose and vital human connections that seemed to serve as moorings in a life too routinely unsteadied by the gathering gloom. So when a weekend last October spiraled out of control and led to a fateful decision that ended Jake's life, the world crumbled beneath the Palets.
Standing in the doorway to Jake's room at about 9:30 p.m. on Oct. 29, his father had no clue that the image of Jake playing the popular game "Fortnite" would be his last. The next day, Rita Palet found her son with the game remote in his hand. The San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office ruled Jake died because of accidental "fentanyl intoxication."
"That's when the nightmare started for us," Dave said.
Jake had attempted suicide twice, once in 2016 and again in 2017. He refused to shy away from the mental and emotional roller coaster that consumed him. He talked openly to players or anyone hunting an ear about the reality of depression, cutting through the stigma a conversation at a time.
When he posted a video to relate his own struggles, explaining that "just because you're smiling on the outside doesn't mean you're smiling on the inside," Jake was invited to speak at a suicide prevention walk in Liberty Station.
In April, former Major League Baseball player and family friend Bret Boone joined the "Dave and Jeff Podcast" with Palet and longtime friend and partner Jeff Dotseth. In the Palets' garage, Jake stopped Boone to excitedly rattle off the fresh chapters being written in his life.
"He was the best, the best I'd seen him," Boone said. "He cornered me and I wasn't talking. There was so much he wanted to tell me. I walked out of the house thinking, 'Man, he's in a good place.' "
So many things were going right for Jake, from his love of working with blossoming players to his growing confidence and success in his first lap as a comedian. Seemingly, the fog had cleared after so long. Finally, sunlight was creeping in.
Then, his father said, an unidentified acquaintance gave him a Xanax pill to help him sleep. It was laced with fentanyl, the same opioid that led to the death of musical megastar Prince. The drug is so dangerous, some 30-50 times more powerful than heroin, that even the equivalent of a grain or two of salt can be deadly.
It stopped his heart. It broke all the others around him.
"In his last year of life, Jake was winning," Dave said.
